Danny O'Dea

To write a year-in-review list immediately after the year ends is always a fascinating experiment. What ends up sticking in your brain five, ten, twenty years after the New Year’s Eve confetti has settled is…

I sat down today to write a review for The French Dispatch. Or the Last Night in Soho. Or Dune. Something new. Something in the zeitgeist. Something the SEO algorithms would have been really proud…

“That was a pretty savage review that Adina had, let’s see what it’s actually like.” “Ralph Fiennes is really leaning into this whole pipe schtick. I wonder if that’ll be a thing this whole movie?”…

Prologue One of the grandest moments in film history came to a head last week, shifting the cinematic landscape forever. Careers were ended. Lives were changed. In short, the most significant event in the medium…

Judith Kerr was nearly 50 years old when she heard something she could not excuse. Her children remarked to her one night that they had always imagined her childhood as being similar to The Sound…

As it happens, human history is so speckled by atrocities, so littered with tragedies and the bodies left behind from them, that We-As-A-Collective are bound to forget more than we memorialize. It’s simply the law…

Towards the end of Nomadland, Chloe Zhao, laying all her cards on the table, tells us what her film is really about. “What’s remembered, lives,” says the forgotten woman while the sun sets deep in…

A man sits on a bench, wrapped in a coat he’s owned for years. He rests his feet at the head of Jaffa Street in Jerusalem. A tour guide comes along, decked to the nines…

Following up their recent Academy Award-nominated feature, the Japanese animation stalwart and truly a standard-bearer brand synonymous with quality animated film, Studio Ghibli turned to a classic novel by famous British young adult fantasy author Dianne…

What’s Up with the Weather? There’s an old saying well-trod by old men in the county that I come from. They jump over each other to be the first one to say whenever a young…

Have you heard the story of the Rouletista? I promise you don’t know what you’re getting into when you hit play on Derek DelGaudio’s In & Of Itself. It’s impossible, really, and that’s okay. It’s…

For Context: When Inside Out was released in 2015, it was a revelation. On one hand, it was simply another link in the Pixar chain of “what if ________ had feelings?” (pick an object and…

This may be a controversial opinion, but O Brother, Where Art Thou? is the Coen Brothers’ best film. It’s my favorite, anyway. And there when I feel quite passionately about something, I find it helps to lay…

The Emperor’s New Groove turned 20 years old this week and, despite my inability to accurately spell “Emperor” on the first try, it remains one of the warmest, most charming films in my memory. Starring…

When I first asked my girlfriend this question, she said “Danny what the hell, get out, I’m trying to teach first grade virtually, get out of the room!” “Perfect,” I said, “let’s ask them too!”…

How the gentle wind, Beckons through the leaves, As autumn colors fall. Dancing in a swirl, Of golden memories, The loveliest lies of all.   October came to a close this last weekend, which means…